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Ta to Richard (Biff) Birkin and all at Pixel-Lab who made Playful happen. Highlights for me were:

Alfie Dennen & Paula Le Dieu

Their new project Bus-tops, and will create a london-wide networked canvas of LED displays on the roof’s of bus shelters that anyone can create art and games for. Bus-Tops was the winning entrant in the London arc of the Artists Taking The Lead fund, an Arts Council and London Olympics public art project.

Katy Lindemann

Behaviour change through play. Slides etc here.

Chris O’Shea

Shelter Air Guitar Championship 2008 from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

Who? Chris O’Shea sits somewhere between artist and designer, creating experiences that playfully challenge our perception of spaces and objects.

What? He will talk about creating installations full of charm, joy & wonder, including police lights, chickens, giant hands, air guitar, xray torches, spinning mirrors and music boxes.

Molly Ränge

storytelling, pedagogy and creation of learning contexts in a post digital age. http://www.fabel.se

Daniel Soltis

Who dat? Daniel Soltis is an interaction designer at Tinker.it! and a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. His work focuses on physical computing, large-scale interfaces, and playful interactions….urban and pervasive games.

GPS puzzle box made for a wedding present was a highlight.

Two reviews of the day here and here.

Feedback would be – lets walk the talk and make it more fun and interactive next time (eg Kaos Pilots and Sandpit/Hide & Seek), and make sure the non-gamers feel welcome in the first 10 minutes. Also consider getting someone along from Reggio Children if we could be so lucky.

Thank goodness for the Moral Compass folk (eg. Molly, Katy) who helped us work out the big Why? on it all… lots of smarts and loveliness in the room – people that could really make a difference in the world. Still not convinced online life/games are going to help us all to share and be happy. More mention of directing our efforts towards Climate Crisis solutions would also have been welcome.

Who would a keynote Moral Compass person be, with a playful style? Alain de Botton comes to mind…

Gordon Brown today warned that the world is on the brink of a “catastrophic” future of killer heatwaves, floods and droughts unless governments speed up negotiations on climate change before vital talks in Copenhagen in December.

This applies to the US as much as anyone, he said, adding that “there is no plan B”, and that agreement cannot be deferred beyond the UN-sponsored Copenhagen conference.

Posted via web from grasuth

See this, which caught my eye. This is information I actually wanted to know. 

Very complex issue, well explained in pictures/metaphor:

Dave’s new book is going on the wishlist right now.

Posted via web from CO2

The TrickleStar calculator works out your CO2 and money savings when
you install a TrickleSaver (a USB or power sensor) that then switches
off accessories attached to your TV/Home Entertainment setup or your
home or office computer setup.

To use this one, you build a list of devices connected to the TV or
computer, then work out how much they are normally left on or on
standby. Then the calculator will tell you how much you save in a
year, and the payoff period and CO2 savings.

The payoff periods end up pretty small especially if you have a game
console that is left on. Wow. A lot of them use a lot of power.

I really like this calculator, but I would say that. I built this
one for TrickleStar. It is embeddable, sharable, and comes in an
increasing set of languages.

We spent quite a lot of time getting the data together for this
calculator, ending up getting some help from AMEE and the MTP Whatif
data for estimating average device power.

Try it out at http://calculator.tricklestar.com

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New Scientist reports on the psychology of climate change, and references a couple of papers on the subject.

Bottom lines from this:

1/ Psychology can help how we sell the message that change is needed, and that change is good.
2/ Messages need to be tailored to the interests of individual groups
3/ ‘Fitting in with the crowd’ is powerful. So working with others to conserve resources works.
4/ Having information about your own consumption is really important, as are comparisons with others, but look out for data that shows people use less than their peers, which may encourage more usage.

Some quotes:

In one experiment, the researchers left information with households in San Marcos asking them to use fans rather than air conditioners at night, turn off lights and take shorter showers. Some messages simply stressed energy conservation, some talked about future generations, while others emphasised the financial savings. But it was the flyers that implored residents to join with their neighbours in saving energy that were most effective in cutting electricity consumption (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 913).

…

MOST people seem to conserve energy if provided with real-time feedback on how much they are using. But feedback can be too immediate.

…

Studies show that devices that display domestic energy usage produce savings of between 5 and 12 per cent.

Lots of useful info and links to the actual papers at newscientist.com

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Here are three things you can do to get started:

1. Sign up to 10:10

If you haven’t made a committment to the 10% reduction, go to the 10:10 website and sign up.  That’s important.  It adds to the volume of people and business that have signed up, and makes it harder for the government to ignore, so there’s something useful for them to take to Copenhagen.  You can sign up as a person or as a business or as a school or an organisation.

2. Look at the Guardian G2 guide to get ideas where to make changes

The Guardian published a really clear guide to personal carbon reductions, with simple actions and real numbers.  They start with averages of  CO2 per year then lists lots of actions you can take to make CO2 savings.  It begins:

Every year, each person in the UK is, on average, responsible for about 14 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. (The government’s published figures suggest a lower amount, but they omit things such as international aviation.) So, if we want to make a genuine cut of 10% across the board, we need to reduce our emissions by about 1.4 tonnes each. Let’s call it 1.5 tonnes, just to be sure.

And goes on with useful savings you can make by tonnes per year.   This is the best short reference I have seen so far.

3. Start an EcoTeam, measure and reduce

Gather your neighbours or online friends and start measuring, learning and reducing your Rubbish, Energy, Water and Travel.  Sign up and create an EcoTeams online — invite friends, and start measuring and learning and reducing your usage.

EcoTeams Website

You can sign up online now and get started gathering your team together.

EcoTeams is one of my favourites, perhaps because I’ve been working on several releases of the EcoTeams website over the last couple of years.  This latest version makes fully online EcoTeams easy, and support you a lot in taking measurements and inviting others to get involved.

Here are three ways to get started. I’ll do an update article in a few days with a few more online resources to have a look at, incluing using power saving plug adapter things, energy monitors and turning things off.

The 10:10 campaign, born out of the Age of Stupid film, launches today, September 1st.

Great film.  Please go and see it or put on a screening if you haven’t seen it already.

It puts the case for doing something to avoid a future climate disaster.    But what can you practically do now?  That’s the question that 10:10 answers.   Reduce your carbon footprint 10% in 2010.  Not that hard, just takes a small behaviour change or two and there you are, part of the (positive)  future.

Sign up, take on the future and Do Something:

http://1010uk.org

One of the actions you can take on as a part of you 10:10 action is to join an EcoTeam, to work with you community or group of friends to measure and reduce your energy, water, waste and travel in a small group working together.  By measuring your resource use, and making your results visible, you get to see how you can change your behaviour.  Doing this in community helps you make a change and feel good about it, by doing it together.

I spend most of my days building and enhancing the EcoTeams website and measurement and reporting tools, so I’ve seen it work and have seen the positive, carbon saving, money saving results that people get from it.   10% is achievable and worth doing. You save the planet and save money and feel good. Beat that.

Mothers are increasingly fed up with jobs that do not allow them to spend enough time with their children. So instead, they are starting their own businesses. The number of women working for themselves has leapt by nearly 20% since 2000, according to official figures, and now tops a million.

And an opinion poll commissioned by the government shows that the most significant factor in the increase is a desire among women for a better balance between work and family life.”

From BBC News

Clarification: my services extend beyond online social networking. See here for more.

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Making Social Networks Your Business…

by Miranda Glover

The social web changes the marketing game by making it participative. LIBBY DAVY, inspirational social web expert, artist and mother, offers insight into becoming SMART (specific, measurable, achieveable, realistic and timely) when marketing your business.

Read this article carefully, it’s the new holy grail for all aspiring mumpreneurs…

An Australian communications and PR specialist with an engaging smile, Libby Davy now lives with her technology-savvy husband, young daughter and dog, in Brighton, West Sussex. She’s a web champion with a social conscience, who is hugely enthusiastic about the way women use the internet today. “We are natural social animals,” she explains, “Women love to communicate, to collaborate, to create connections. The internet’s our natural home.”

A few years ago, terms like ‘googling’ and ‘surfing’ may have felt alien, but today we all do these things with the same ease as hanging out the washing. The web’s become invaluable and not just for doing the supermarket shopping. We’re also communicating with old friends and ex-colleagues and keeping an eye on our kids through the social websites they use, like Bebo and Facebook, too. Oh! and of course some of us are using it for dating, as well. Even so, are we really taking full advantage of the internet’s social dimension to support our business needs? Libby shakes her head; clearly thinks not.

She and her husband run a technology company called, Nodestone, which combines middleware development (her husband’s bit and a techy term you don’t need to understand) with a social networking consultancy (the bit we are interested in). Through it, Libby runs workshops to explain how the web is a social network that enables you to do far more than keep in touch with your mates. Whilst traditional media can still be useful for promoting your business, the web is SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely). Libby encourages us to, “Try not to fear the jargon. There are a few new terms worth understanding, as they will give you confidence to harness all the values the web has to offer.”

She points me to her website for some clear advice. It tells me that “vast numbers of people are using blogs, social networks, photo and video sharing sites as important marketing and engagement tools.” Libby explains further, “Building your buzz in these spaces is a good way to find your market. Getting the right bloggers to write about your activities (blog outreach) is also a good way to reach interested people.”

These activities will help build traffic to your business’s website. This is critical if you want to raise your search rankings. (e.g when someone keys your business type into google or Yahoo search your company to come up towards the top of the results). Libby explains that to achieve this, “exchange links with relevant blogs and other sites, and remember that a personal request works best. A good way to start is by commenting on other blogs that are writing about your topics. It’s also a good idea to have a blog as part of your site; it’s an easy way to keep the content fresh and the site alive.”

You can use social networks to build a list of ‘friends’ who you can message in a similar way to email and so promote your website. Social networks also have a viral aspect where people sign-up to your cause because they’ve seen it appear in a friend’s newsfeed or on their profile. You can make it easy to sign up by adding links to your Facebook, Myspace, Bebo or other social networking profiles on to your website homepage.

“Social networks work best when you put a lot of time into them, sending messages, responding to friend requests, commenting on other people’s profiles,” Libby warns. “But the results can be really worthwhile. They are informal social spaces, so the more personal and friendly you can be, the better. People in social networks will tend to ignore corporate communications.”

She advises that you think carefully about who you are trying to attract using social networking sites, in some societies they are mostly used by a younger audience, however they are increasingly gaining popularity with different communities.

Twitter is the most recent term on everyone’s lips, since Barack Obama used it so successfully for his presidential campaign.

“It’s hard to describe Twitter well,” laughs Libby, “Except as a mixture of micro-blogging (160 characters per entry as in mobile phone text messages) and social networking. It works across the web and with mobile phones and feels ‘live’.”

People are using Twitter to share interesting content, especially to respond to things that are happening at that moment or to share snippets of and links to interesting articles and blog posts.

Evaluation

I ask her how you can you see if all your social marketing is working?

“A simple tool you can use for free is Google Alerts,” she says. “You can set this up through going to the main google website and specifying which key words you want it to alert you about when they are used on a website. Google Alerts then emails you when these keywords are mentioned in online media and blogs.”

“The mantra of online marketing is ‘measure everything’. For your site, the main tool will probably be Google Analytics, it’s free and provides a lot of detail on your website statistics; who’s using your site, where they are coming from to reach your site and what they are looking at. For your social networks you’ll largely be relying on the stats you can get from them, such as number of friends, number of comments, and number of video views. The web promises what traditional PR & marketing never could – the possibility of measuring engagement.”

The social web changes the whole marketing game by making it participative. You don’t just want to get people interested, you want to get them involved. Encourage people to bookmark your site in social bookmarking services like Delicious and always encourage friends and supporters of your initiative to and encourage your friends to promote your cause.”

With this Libby takes a breath. “There’s so much more to say,” she laughs, “but perhaps this is enough for one day. “

10 new web terms your business should know….

Blog

A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse time order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject; some function as more personal online diaries. Blog software (eg. Wordpress) is often used to build websites for organisations now, as it is easy and free to use.

Syndication

Syndication means that anyone can subscribe to your blog and receive automatic notification that it has been updated. It uses RSS feeds.

RSS

Really Simple Syndication is a technology that allows Internet users to receive ongoing, constantly updated information from many sources through a simple reader or aggregator (eg. Google Reader). This is supplied through an “RSS feed” that users can subscribe to.

Aggregator

A feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader or simply as an aggregator, is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.

Social bookmarking

The ability to save and categorise a personal collection of bookmarks through services such as Delicious and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others.

Web rings

A group of websites with a common theme, built in a loop, allowing a surfer easy access to subsequent sites in the ring by clicking on links. There are thousands of web rings around in all sorts of categories and issues.

Social networking

A broad class of websites and services that allow you to connect with friends, family, and colleagues online, as well as meet people with similar interests or hobbies. Popular examples include MySpace, Facebook, Linked In. Even photo sharing websites like Flickr have become places for social networking through shared interests.

Online Media Storage

Websites that allow you to store, share and view a range of media such as digital photographs (see Flickr), audio files like podcasts, video (see YouTube).

Carnivals

Weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly roundups of blogs on a particular issue or topic.

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Note: things have already moved on, and this would not still be my essential list of terms.

Now you need never wonder what that little groove called under your nose in called…

How many people in your organisation / community could do with understand what the Internet is? Tailored, experiential training sessions available.